Treasure Island (originally titled The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys[1]) is an adventure and historical novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson.

The novel was originally serialised from 1881 to 1882 in the children's magazine Young Folks under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola, credited to the pseudonym "Captain George North".

Days later, Pew, a blind beggar, visits the inn, delivering a summons to Bones called "the black spot".

While hidden in an apple barrel, Jim overhears a conversation among the Hispaniola's crew which reveals that many of them are pirates who had served on Captain Flint's ship, the Walrus, with Silver leading them.

In the morning, Livesey arrives to treat the wounded and sick pirates, and tells Silver to look out for trouble once he's found the site of the treasure.

[3] To amuse his 12-year old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, he used the idea of a secret map as the basis of a story about hidden treasure.

Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow public house on the Devon coast, that it's all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny and a derelict ship...

A century later, novels such as S. H. Burney's The Shipwreck (1816), and Sir Walter Scott's The Pirate (1822) continued to expand upon Defoe's classic.

In a letter from July 1884 to Sidney Colvin, he wrote that, "Treasure Island came out of Kingsley's At Last, where I got the Dead Man's Chest — and that was the seed — and out of the great Captain Johnson's History of the Notorious Pirates."

Stevenson also admits that he took the idea of Captain Flint's pointing skeleton from Poe's The Gold-Bug and he constructed Billy Bones's history from the "Money-Diggers" section ("Golden Dreams" in particular[8]) of Tales of a Traveller by Washington Irving, one of his favourite writers.

In his research, Kelly showed that Stevenson was a neighbour of the named victim in Edinburgh, and so was aware from an early age of these events, which had been a scandal at the time.

This followed a previous announcement by Alan Evans of Wirral Borough Council that the French science fiction writer Jules Verne had also set his 1874 novel The Mysterious Island in Birkenhead.

Their letters of support for Mr Lamb's claims were posted on the Jules Verne and the Heroes of Birkenhead website in August 2022.

[29][30][31] Stevenson's Treasure Island has spawned an enormous amount of literature based upon the original novel: Several sequels have also been produced in film and television, including: In worldbuilding, there are:

[75] It was also noted that history has a strange way of turning full circle as 53 years later, it took the very same studio's first Pirates of the Caribbean movie to reinvent and reinvigorate a moribund genre which delighted millions.

[76] One thing screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio took from their experience on Treasure Planet, was the simple premise of, "Is Long John Silver a delightful Falstaffian character or a contemptible villain?"

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides has Hector Barbossa begin wearing a wooden peg leg where a real one used to be, revealed to have been lost in an off-screen encounter with Blackbeard.

[84] One of Chris Schweizer's early ideas for the Pirates of the Caribbean comic book series was to have Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann's 12-or-13-year-old son be involved in Jack Sparrow's search for Anamaria who had disappeared while searching for a mystical treasure, with the boy eventually growing up and becoming Billy Bones, a character from Treasure Island.

[citation needed] A phantom pirate named Black Dog Briar appears in the video game expansion.